Friend of FOG! Eric Smith is the co-founder of Geekadelphia and the Philly Geek Awards, and the social media manager at Quirk Books. He’s the author of The Geek’s Guide to Dating and his debut YA novel, Inked, is due out in the Fall of 2014. His latest project is an essay which appears in the fantastic new book, The Asteroid Belt Almanac, an anthology of “geekery, humor, solemnity & science” that’s available now from The Head & The Hand Press.
It’s a fantastic volume that’s got a little bit of something for everyone and I highly recommend it. You can read Eric’s touching essay on dating in the digital age, Craigslist Time Machine (or A Missed Connection), after the jump.
Craigslist Time Machine (or A Missed Connection)by Eric SmithIn the event the wildest dreams of H.G. Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, or Ray Bradbury came to fruition, and time travel suddenly became available, I sure would love to write myself a Missed Connection on Craigslist and tell my past self not to meet my future wife.
Okay. Before we continue, I should explain a few things.
I don’t want you thinking this is some silly comedy stand up “take my (future) wife, please!” shtick, or that I’m some sad, miserable husk typing away in front of a dim screen, overwhelmed with regret and rue about choosing the wrong woman. In fact, while I’m writing this, she’s lying on the couch, snuggled up in a black and white fleece blanket, her curly hair cushioning her head against an already soft pillow. And she’s looking lovely as ever.
It’s because we almost met. Seven years ago. In 2007. Because of Craigslist.
Let’s imagine those vehicles dreamed up in classic science fiction do exist, and we hop in Herbert’s time machine and travel to the fall of 2012. I was working on an article for a local Philadelphia paper and wanted to share the piece with my now fiancée. It was an article I was particularly proud of, and I wanted to make sure I got it right. But for some bizarre reason, she wasn’t getting any of my recent emails with the article attached. After several tries, she asked me what email address I was using. So I told her.
“How do you have that email?” She immediately asked, surprised and confused. “I haven’t used that email address in five, maybe six years!”
After searching in my Gmail, I found a number of our messages to each other, sent over the past few months. Archived moments from the earliest stages of our relationship, many of which persist today. There was nothing terribly surprising. Emails to plan (Groupon) dates, links to nonsense Top 10 lists from around the Internet, blog posts I said I totally read but she knows I totally didn’t, YouTube videos of corgi puppies… you know, the usual stuff modern couples send around thanks to the joys of technology and the Internet. And then, when I typed in this mysterious other email I had been using, I discovered the cause of all the confusion.
We had emailed each other several years ago.
And we’d only first met last year.
All right let’s break the heart of Heinlein and his Door Into the Summer, and let’s take a door into the winter instead. Specifically, the late, fading winter. January of 2007, when I first moved from New Jersey to the city of Philadelphia for graduate school. I only knew two people in the city, one of my best friends from high school and a pal from my days of playing saxophone in ska (yes, yes I know) bands. The first would help me buy furniture for my first apartment, teach me how to cook, and introduce me to the joys of beer before moving back to her (and our) hometown, while the second… well, we are groomsmen in each other’s future weddings, so needless to say we are still close.
However, I was still pretty lonely in a new city all on my own. So I did what a lot of people do… or at least did, back then.
I turned to Craigslist.
There, in the website equivalent of a dark alley, I posted an ad in the Strictly Platonic section hoping to connect with people like me, looking for friends in a city that felt big and intimidating. I hadn’t heard of Meetup yet, and I think I used a T-Mobile Sidekick to post my ad. It was an early one, black and white screen and all. And that’s how we first found each other.
The emails back and forth were innocent enough. We talked about our goals. She wanted to become a probation officer, while I was a poor graduate student dreaming of the novels I’d write someday. She spent her evenings dining in fancy restaurants and partying in nightclubs, while I was surviving on a diet of pasta and the dollar menu at Wendy’s, going through the first two seasons of Supernatural on DVD. We swapped AOL Instant Messenger names (remember when that was still a thing?), and I’m not sure what happened after that.
We never met up.
Was it something one of us had said? Did I come on too strong, or did she simply lose interest in this odd stranger on the Internet? Maybe I left a weird away message up. This was 2007 after all, and that was still a thing people did. Perhaps it was due to the likely silly lyrics from a New Found Glory or Taking Back Sunday or Dashboard Confessional song, and she opted to stop talking with me.
Maybe I mentioned the whole Supernatural thing? The fact that I cut up dollar menu chicken nuggets and put them in the dollar menu Caesar salad, thus creating the cheapest and, frankly, most brilliantly conceived chicken Caesar salad in the downtown Philadelphia area?
Whatever the case was, it never happened. We never got together. Had technology in 2007 failed me… or perhaps, done me a favor?
Let’s push the lever forward on Wells’s time machine and skip to the year 2012, summertime. I’ve left the world of Craigslist for a more updated visual platform: OkCupid. Here, people post pictures and lengthy biographies that detail just about everything. Hair color. Favorite music. Height. Career goals. Salary. You can even rank people with stars, as though they’re books, computers, or toasters on Amazon.
It’s here where we reconnect thanks to a supremely awkward message sent her way, followed by an array of notes sent back and forth. Sometimes from my computer, other times from an app on my iPhone.
We talk about our careers, our goals, many of which have changed if one were to compare the original Craigslist emails with our OkCupid messages. But most of the core stuff is still there: working with people, writing, graduate schools, and the like. We leave the constraints of OkCupid messages and quickly start sending emails, text messages, and quick, nervous phone calls, our letters and voices carrying through the air and space, helping us find one another again. Even though we didn’t know we’d already found each other so many years ago.
Push that time machine’s lever up four months. It’s here, around my thirtieth birthday, that I realize this is the woman I’m going to marry. I first bring this up in my favorite bar, where I’m chatting with one of my best friends, the guy who used to play in ska bands with me, while sipping on a Yuengling, the beer my hometown pal introduced me to… as though everything had come full circle.
A little over a year later, she’d say yes.
When I tell this story, most people (myself included) make remarks about how it would have been amazing if we met back then. But back then, in 2007, we probably weren’t right for each other. Over the course of those years, I learned a lot about myself. About the man I wanted to be. As for her, she moved a lot, finding herself in new cities on new adventures, learning more about who she was before coming back to settle in Philadelphia.
Who would she have met in 2007? That version of myself is someone I hardly recognize anymore. The struggling graduate student, still so torn about whether or not he’d actually make it in this new state, in this new city. Living in a two-bedroom apartment with three strangers, one of whom slept on a bare mattress in the living room. Still, 2007 me had a lush head of hair. There was that. But that’s all superficial. The important stuff, like having mature relationships, discovering and achieving major personal goals, making an effort to connect with my family more, learning what it means to truly live on one’s own… all those complicated things that make you an adult, were still nonexistent.
I think in this way, technology didn’t fail me when it came to making a proper connection. It’s a connection that I missed, but not a connection that I missed, if you catch my Office-Space-style phrasing. In some strange, unknown way, it pushed us apart, only to bring us back together at the exact right moment. The years gave us time to grow, and as I sit back and reflect on them, I find that I don’t regret that time we had apart. In the end, it made me a better man for it, and a better man for her.
So maybe somewhere out there, somewhere in the future, time travel has been invented. Maybe when I’m old and fading, the technology will surface. And maybe I’ll think back to this little essay, to our strange and quirky love story… and I actually won’t write that letter, that Missed Connections post written for the me of the past.
The lonely version of me, in early 2007, probably would have received this note about my future wife and chased her with reckless abandon, ruining all chances of it working, leading to the non-existence of my future, happy self. He wouldn’t complicate friendships, make mistakes, have regrets, and learn the lessons that shape him for the better. He wouldn’t go on to have his heart broken in ways that paved the path for my future wife to mend it, to fix me, as it were.
Perhaps this essay isn’t so much about wanting to send a note to the past, to post a blip on Craigslist, but to send this note to the future. A reminder to be grateful for your time apart, to remember you met at the right time, in the right place. That all the heartache and tears… it’ll add up to something. And that something, that someone, will show up, when you’re finally ready.
And on that note, we’ll push the lever of this time machine to 2014, coming back to the present, where everything is, thankfully, as it should be.
